Industry Expert Blogs
Quality street-December 16, 2009 |
About ten years ago, the semiconductor intellectual property (IP) was just getting underway. Although ARM and MIPS had carved out decent businesses for themselves selling processor cores by that time - ARM floated in April 1998 and was riding high courtesy of the Internet stock boom - there were still serious doubts over the viability of the IP business model. Ten years on, there still are.
At the recent IP-ESC conference in Grenoble, some old favourites from the early days came back with a vengeance, such as the perennial favourite, IP quality. The system-on-chip (SoC) industry has, on the one hand, dealt reasonably well with the quality issue. And IP is now a core part of SoC design. It's hard to think of any SoC on the market that does not incorporate a hardware block bought from somewhere else.